Complex heroine warranted a sequel
For the past couple years while Amy Stuart was writing her bestselling new thriller, Still Water, daily headlines reporting on egregious gender inequality, sexual harassment and violence against women became an unavoidable reality. Not one to sit around waiting to take action, the feminist-minded high school teacher volunteered as a co-organizer of Toronto’s inaugural women’s marches.
“Personally, I was angry at a lot of the world’s situation, in particular around women and misogyny, and that made its way into the book,” Stuart says.
Stuart’s first thriller, 2016’s Still Mine, introduced readers to her tough-minded but damaged and drug-addicted protagonist Clare, on the run from a violent marriage. Clare is recruited by the enigmatic private investigator Malcolm Boon — who was originally hired by her abusive husband Jason to track her down — to locate another woman who disappeared from a mountain mining town. Still Mine was nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel.
Still Water wastes no time, launching where the first novel left off. Clare, sober and recovering from a gunshot wound to her shoulder, is assigned by Malcolm to a secret refuge for abused women where a resident, Jane Proulx, has disappeared with her boisterous young son. Both are presumably swept away in a nearby river, but the circumstances surrounding their death are suspicious. Malcolm provides Clare with a mysterious file filled with intimate details of Jane’s background, which in many ways mirrors Clare’s own history of domestic abuse. She ably takes on the persona of Jane’s friend and is reluctantly admitted into a family with its own history of bloody violence and deceit.
Complicating matters are two police officers investigating the case, Clare’s suspicions of Malcolm’s motives for sending her there and the fear that her husband is nearby, waiting to attack.
Before she even started writing, Stuart read up on case studies and first-person narratives about addiction and domestic assault. “I wanted it to ring true and be authentic and nuanced,” she says. “I didn’t want to use it as a plot device but really try to give this character some depth and some life.” After Still Mine was published, Stuart received feedback from some readers who were annoyed that Clare made such terrible choices through the book. But Stuart was quick to defend her character as a woman who was doing the best she could, considering the horrific trauma she had endured. “I wanted her decision-making and her capacity to survive in this situation to reflect that, and not just have her be a simple easy hero who is perfectly recovered in only 300 pages,” Stuart says. “I think really giving her a lot of depth and complexity, and humanizing her experience as much as possible, was what I was aiming to do.”
Originally, Stuart had envisioned Clare’s story as one book. But in 2014, after she met with her new publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, to show her editor an early draft of the book, it became clear that the slow-trickling hopefulness she wanted to build could not be achieved within that number of pages. Still Mine stands on its own as a thriller, but those who haven’t read the first book can still follow along Clare’s journey.
Still Mine’s setting in a dark, mountain town was deliberately chosen because it felt foreign and scary to Stuart, who wanted Clare to experience that same claustrophobic fear of being surrounded by massive towering rocks. For Still Water, Stuart edged the location a little closer to home. She wrote the bulk of the book at a cottage up north while observing how weirdly fast and high the nearby river was moving after a heavy rain. She will return there this summer to write the concluding title in Clare’s trilogy. “I knew getting Clare from where she is on the first page to a place of hopefulness about her life and self was going to take more than one book,” Stuart says.